Translating, Translators

Now for a change a switch to English after four exhausting days of Hebrew-izing myself, I don't think it's stupid to try your hand at a language which isn't natural to you - after all English is perhaps the only language that truly melts in my hands and allows me to do with it everything I want, but it was an exercise of several years. In a way reading back I notice a kind of ontological problem, that of having that Derridean grammatology quite overdeveloped - For Derrida the world is a text, and there's no 'other' text (unlike the 'alterite' of Levinas) therefore interpretation (hermeneutics) is not only the only possible language but also the only possible world; this in order to say that I use the grammar of anarchy in any language, certainly in English (long burdensome German sentences) and no less in German (with thematic mutilations, like the style of Celan)... but I guess there's something about developing one's particular style and insofar as it is understandable (meaning interpretable) then it should be OK. The writing in Hebrew and the attempt at translating is of course so much part of the philosophy as anything else, like the collecting pictures, letters, postcards, advertisements; or the orgiastic drinking and the religious diremption.

Like I wrote in a letter to K., I think there's a serious problem with aesthetics - the most fundamental concepts of the world are beyond doubt offsprings from aestheticizing, after all philosophy had its origins in a contemplative position that the modern age has overturned in every possible way, yet the principles are unmovable. Surrealism like in the case of Achim Von Armin ("the everyday world is the surreal world") opens the first possibilities for this overcoming of aesthetics by placing the surreal feature of private art in the public world (in German, the public world also connotates an 'open' world, like in Simmel's model of Modernity and alas! Heidegger's), therefore blurring and destroying the boundaries between thought or art and life. Yet this 'destruction' is a dangerous devise, for it opens the gates to the abyss of negative Gnosis (anti-epistemic knowledge but very much pistic) that one finds so easily cunning in religious fundamentalism and totalitarianism no less than in the imminent confusion between the religious and the secular in our times, the Death-of-God culture. Two artists come to mind when I try working out a solution - the poet Else Lasker-Schüler and the painter Charlotte Salomon, representatives of the modern Expressionist movement. For Else and Charlotte there are no boundaries between life and thought, between word and world.... and the misrecognition or rather non-recognition of these boundaries is where the anti-mythical thinking is at stake. At the same time the overcoming of the boundaries might lead as well (and in fact did) to the elimination of certain concepts that assure the place of man in the world; for example through overcoming the concepts of politics and education, therefore throwing man into the totalization of both secularity and religion but from a negative and upside-down angle.

Now we return to the language problem. Habermas was one of the few philosophers in our age who attempted to define the limits of our world from a perspective outside language and greatly failed, not by antinomies but rather by linguistic tautologies that belong in the sphere of logical semantics and not of philosophy. My disagreement with G. on this point is beyond argument, I'm unable to accept as diremption a philosophy whose main concern is self-explanation (this attitude is so very anti-philosophical) and that wants to tackle the 'basic questions'. As a remarkable problem of continental philosophy is the inability to address such questions, if anything, out of the collapse of the metaphysical language that the late modern age discovered. This collapse is thought to have been placed in the abyss of Auschwitz and I believe that it is as old as the rise of the Copernican world (with Kant as its philosophical ambassador); albeit I disagree with Löwith and Voegelin on placing it as early as the Gnostic movements of the middle ages. Their mistake is two-fold, first they damnate Modernity way before the rise of the typical modern consciousness (with Leibniz and Descartes, of whom there's no mention) and second they also fail to notice (like Jacob Taubes did in a rather negative way) that the source of the Gnosis is the Pauline theology, but consequentially speaking the ill doesn't start there... too many other elements have to collide as well. Metaphysics and Christianity are not guilty for Auschwitz, here I'm entirely secular: This was an act committed by men and they must be held responsible for it, it's not a philosophical mistake or a theological consequence. To think it to be so, is at beast naive. Philosophy should be made -using a Kantian cliche- within the limits of language alone! So that Heidegger might have been totally right in pointing out language as the house of Being. But I'm not too interested in 'Being', because finally the concept itself is a metaphysical antinomy.

That's why I cling onto the Hebrew, because what is at stake is the variegance of the line that divides philosophy from Hebrew (and I want to say Hebrew, not Jewish thinking)... and perhaps I might be likely to believe that the idea of 'Hebrew thinking' is feasible but altogether misunderstood in the modern age. I don't think it's possible to have a Jewish philosophy (and by this I don't mean a theological philosophy of Judaism) in a language other than Hebrew.... only thus, one could be able to conversate with the tradition. All other attempts are at best an apocalyptic momentum of Western thought with nicely quoted Biblical passages. That the language doesn't like me too much is certain, and I'm so grateful Yoav and Nimrod have pointed out to me how it works: It is not a matter of not knowing how to write at all but of recognizing there's much more to the grammar and the spelling that one would dare hear. I know this to be true from the letters of G. and K., notwithstanding the appalling beauty of their phrasings there's a certain touch of un-grammativity that makes the language unnatural. This by no means eliminates the beauty and is a very technical matter, but restrains the language so to speak from its natural potentiality to describe the world in its own terms.

Margarete Susman I've found to be one of the greatest writers to be translated into Hebrew, her poems are just made out of chunks of a kind of Bible of culture. Arendt is a different matter, her poems can hardly sound interesting no matter how hard one can rework the eliptic and paratactic phrasings. Else Lasker-Schüler was certainly invented just so that she could be translated into Hebrew, but the Hebrew necessary for this is not epic (like Susman's) but rather a strange mixture of Bible and everyday language - living up to the breach of boundaries in her whole artistic concept. My language experiences another problem... it has a certain synthetic plasticity that I suspect comes from the Greek ear, and I no longer experience it in English precisely because of my knowledge of Hebrew (in German it's impossible to think without this classical plasticity, unless one could be a genius experimenter like Lasker-Schüler and Celan, yet in some of the greatest moderns like Rilke it is overflowing as well... Brecht is an exemption, he's his own kind of poetry by himself but very German at the same time). This plasticity I think doesn't come willy-nilly, but belongs very well in the history of modern Hebrew and many of the early poets were not entirely bereft of it, except alas! the poets that had a good grounding in the religious texts of Judaism. Even the so-called Canaanite poets (a literary school) indulged in this plasticity (the Aristotelian separation between content and form foreign to most poetic experiences of the Near East) and the last traces are there already in the writers of the 'State of Israel' generation.

Some later authors did overcome this position but I find their literature myself quite uninteresting... in fact it strikes me as less Hebrew than I would like Hebrew to be. There're very many exceptions of course, and I truly admire the themes of the everyday world so typical of a great deal of contemporary Hebrew poetry (and prose), which nevertheless I can't drink from, because my concern with diremption is very unbecoming to that form of narration which I tried my hand at in English when I was younger. Literature becomes history in the Benjaminean sense, a path-finder in the dark of the chasm between receding concepts and the invisible institutions they left behind.